A variety of process-oriented writing instruction strategies are presented in this focused journal issue. Article titles and authors are as follows: (1) "Central Reference to the Rescue" (Rod Kessler); (2)"Brainstorming: A Heuristic that Works" (Frank C. Cronin); (3) "Brainstorming: A Valuable Supplemental Technique for…

This article reports on observations made during an intensive course in French organized by a business firm for its immigrant Portuguese workers. The principal aim of this project was to study course materials as they are actually used. Special attention was therefore paid to: (1) teacher discourse, which, although an essential component of…

Analyzes and compares transcriptions of ten one-to-one conferences between teacher and student. Concludes that successful conferences focus on criteria for successful writing, evaluating students' work, and on the work itself; unsuccessful conferences are characterized by repeated requests for explanation, and by tutor dominance that excludes…

Using a Vygotskian perspective, this study investigated the possibility of secondary school second language students providing scaffolding for each other's learning during dyadic verbal interaction on a dictogloss task. Participants in the study were 19 English-as-a-Second-Language students from China, Hong Kong, and Korea, who studied at a girl's…

Until the late 1960s, rhetoric instruction in the United States ignored forms of rhetoric used by black Americans, although black rhetoric has existed in the United States for as long as black people have lived there. A course in black rhetoric must acknowledge the persuasive intent of all rhetoric, but note at the same time that black rhetoric…

This volume contains 6 selected papers from the First Finnish Summer School of Linguistics, held in Jyvaskyla in June of 1977. The School was organized to create a new forum for postgraduate training of professors in Finland, and for exchange of information about trends in linguistic research. The theme of this first meeting was "language…

The patterns of moves in one type of teaching setting is very fixed: the teacher sets the stage for the learning, then sets tasks or asks questions for others to respond to and then comments on the performances. The problem with this pattern in language classrooms is that language is used differently in non-teaching settings. If students are…

This book addresses the need for higher education to create a community of critical thinkers. It suggests that contemporary curricular reform is already producing citizens of the world as it advocates diversity and multicultural education. The central argument is a defense of the "new education," and is rooted in the ideal of the citizen…

This issue has four articles. Maria del Pilar Garcia Mayo and Teresa Pica in "Is the EFL Environment a Language Learning Environment?" address the question of whether the English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom is an environment that promotes input, feedback, and the production of output that is necessary for successful second…

Discourse analysis has provided a methodology for the study of conversational interactions between language learner and native speaker. This study examines the verbal and nonverbal strategies that native speakers use when communicating with second language learners in natural, non-academic, "survival type" settings. The areas discussed include:…

This text, designed to provide teachers and teacher-trainees with a comprehensive and up-to-date grasp of the theoretical foundations of foreign language teaching, is based on the assumption that a teacher-trainee needs to gain broad but systematic knowledge of the process of second language acquisition in order to understand and adapt teaching…

The plight of students learning language simultaneously with content material, particularly math, spurred this study of the power of socioculturally based pedagogy, such as Instructional Conversation (IC), to increase Spanish-speaking minority students' acquisition of English math lexicon and concepts. This article describes a series of four ICs…

Considerable attention has been given recently to how children educate each other and how to maximize the cognitive benefits of peer learning. Based on papers presented at a 1996 symposium on Cognitive Skills and Learning with Peers, this book focuses on peer learning. Part 1 presents implications of Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories. Part 2…

A social literacies perspective is used to analyze a rap written by a high school student. The article begins with an examination of the student's uses of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and standard English. The student writing sample and the researcher's analysis are subjected to review by two other African American teenagers, and…

This paper examines the notion of schooling and draws on the experiences of Malaysian teenage schoolgirls in contemporary postcolonial Malaysia. Using a critical approach to understandings of schooling, the author unpacks the links between the macro, micro and the personal in examining these girls' negotiations with discourses of schooling. The…